Dynamic creative strategy: Retarget visitors with the products and categories they viewed, featuring large product photography and simple creative.

Going in-house

The advertiser was using a performance marketing partner for its dynamic retargeting. The partner’s solution is a so-called “black box.” You put money in, you get performance out.

Don't worry about what happens in the box — you wouldn't understand.

But "black box" means that you don’t get custom creative and you don’t get to make your own tweaks to your programmatic ad buying – tweaks that might affect performance and efficiency. Conversion attribution can also be extremely tricky with black-box platforms that bury an audience under a deluge of ad impressions that create too much "noise" to really understand how (or if) other channels are contributing.

Our client wanted to take ownership of their ad buying, creative, and performance and decided to take all the elements of their dynamic remarketing program in-house. These were the components our client chose:

Ad stack component

Purpose

Vendor

DSP

Manage programmatic ad buys and traffic creatives

DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM)

Click + impression tracking

Third party click + impression tracking and reporting

Atlas

Viewability tracking

Third party viewability tracking and reporting

DoubleVerify

Conversion tracking

Third party conversion tracking and reporting

Convertro

Dynamic ad creative

Enable dynamic remarketing and ad personalization

Canned Banners

Custom dynamic ad creative

Canned Banners developed three product ad designs for the client. All the designs were simple, featuring large product photography, prominent branding, and an added message about free shipping and returns.

Each creative type was produced in four sizes: 160x600, 300x250, 300x600, and 728x90, for a total of 12 different creative units.

Single-product

This design featured a single product with a very large photo product title, and product price

Two-product

This design included two products, both showing product photo, title, and price.

Multi-product

This design featured a grid of 6-8 products showing product photo and product price.

Third party trackers

The Canned Banners dynamic ad units needed to load three separate pieces of tracking code with every ad impression:

Tracker

Purpose

Type

Atlas

Impression tracking

<IMG> pixel

Convertro

Conversion tracking

<IMG> pixel

DoubleVerify

Viewability tracking

<SCRIPT> tag

Convertro pixel

The Convertro pixel was the simplest. Convertro's <IMG> pixel tag was simply added near the end of the ad HTML of all creatives.

Doubleverify script

DoubleVerify tracks "viewability," which is a tricky thing to measure. As part of data collection, a viewability tracker needs to understand whether the ad's content was rendered within the screen’s viewport (an ad that fully renders offscreen doesn't count as viewable).

DoubleVerify uses a technique that involves wrapping the ad content in a <SPAN> tag that's given a unique, random ID. Then the Doubleverify <SCRIPT> is loaded later in the ad HTML and provided a reference back to the random ID value. Presumably the random ID prevents caching problems and also allows the tracker to work when multiples of the same creative are loaded into a single page at once (e.g., page takeover placements).

Canned Banners used its $D{CACHEBUSTER} creative macro (which expands to a random 10-digit number) to ensure that Convertro's viewability tracker loaded properly for every ad impression.

Atlas pixel and click tracker

Integration with Atlas required a slightly more elegant solution. Read more in the next section...

Atlas click + impression trackers

The advertiser required Atlas tracking to be split into two separately trackable groups that would be trafficked against separate media buys targeting different parts of the purchase funnel and customer journey.

Thou shalt not use redundant code...

To hard-code the Atlas trackers into the creatives would require duplicating each ad unit, resulting in a grand total of 24 ad units for a single campaign and lot of redundant code and assets. This would be unwieldy and error-prone to manage (and expensive for the client), so we came up with a more efficient solution.

Canned Banners creative macros to the rescue!

Luckily, Atlas trackers follow a standardized syntax that we could leverage. Here are two sample trackers:

Notice that both impression and click trackers have the same p= value (which probably equates to 'placement' or some such separately trackable designation). Our advertiser wanted to use two separately trackable groups, so this equated to two p= settings.

Canned Banners set up the trackers to receive the p= value from a Custom Value parameter. The parameter 'ci_atlas_tracker' parameter was set in the ad tag like this:

Producing final ad tags for DoubleClick Bid Manager

The DBM integration was easy – Canned Banners has set up dozens of creatives and campaigns for DBM. We typically deliver <IFRAME> ad tags with DBM macros pre-filled. In this case, the ad tags required two DBM macros:

${CACHEBUSTER} — a random number to prevent cached ad creative from loading, passed into the Canned Banners ad tag via the 'cachebuster=' param.

Canned Banners delivered 24 ad tags to the advertiser, grouped into two Atlas tracking groups of 12. Other than the ad tag Custom Value 'ci_atlas_tracker=', the two sets of ad tags were identical and referenced the same underlying creative files.